Sons and Lovers
appealed with such strength she felt she must make them part of
herself. When she bent and breathed a flower, it was as if she and the
flower were loving each other. Paul hated her for it. There seemed a
sort of exposure about the action, something too intimate.
When he had got a fair bunch, they returned to the house. He listened
for a moment to his mother’s quiet movement upstairs, then he said:
“Come here, and let me pin them in for you.” He arranged them two or
three at a time in the bosom of her dress, stepping back now and then
to see the effect. “You know,” he said, taking the pin out of his
mouth, “a woman ought always to arrange her flowers before her glass.”
Miriam laughed. She thought flowers ought to be pinned in one’s dress
without any care. That Paul should take pains to fix her flowers for
her was his whim.
He was rather offended at her laughter.
“Some women do—those who look decent,” he said.
Miriam laughed again, but mirthlessly, to hear him thus mix her up with
women in a general way. From most men she would have ignored it. But
from him it hurt her.
He had nearly finished arranging the flowers when he heard his mother’s
footstep on the stairs. Hurriedly he pushed in the last pin and turned
away.
“Don’t let mater know,” he said.
Miriam picked up her books and stood in the doorway looking with
chagrin at the beautiful sunset. She would call for Paul no more, she
said.
“Good-evening, Mrs. Morel,” she said, in a deferential way. She sounded
as if she felt she had no right to be there.
“Oh, is it you, Miriam?” replied Mrs. Morel coolly.
But Paul insisted on everybody’s accepting his friendship with the
girl, and Mrs. Morel was too wise to have any open rupture.
It was not till he was twenty years old that the family could ever
afford to go away for a holiday. Mrs. Morel had never been away for a
holiday, except to see her sister, since she had been married. Now at
last Paul had saved enough money, and they were all going. There was to
be a party: some of Annie’s friends, one friend of Paul’s, a young man
in the same office where William had previously been, and Miriam.
It was great excitement writing for rooms. Paul and his mother debated
it endlessly between them. They wanted a furnished cottage for two
weeks. She thought one week would be enough, but he insisted on two.
At last they got an answer from Mablethorpe, a cottage such as they
wished for thirty shillings a week. There was immense jubilation. Paul
was wild with joy for his mother’s sake. She would have a real holiday
now. He and she sat at evening picturing what it would be like. Annie
came in, and Leonard, and Alice, and Kitty. There was wild rejoicing
and anticipation. Paul told Miriam. She seemed to brood with joy over
it. But the Morel’s house rang with excitement.
They were to go on Saturday morning by the seven train. Paul suggested
that Miriam should sleep at his house, because it was so far for her to
walk. She came down for supper. Everybody was so excited that even
Miriam was accepted with warmth. But almost as soon as she entered the
feeling in the family became close and tight. He had discovered a poem
by Jean Ingelow which mentioned Mablethorpe, and so he must read it to
Miriam. He would never have got so far in the direction of
sentimentality as to read poetry to his own family. But now they
condescended to listen. Miriam sat on the sofa absorbed in him. She
always seemed absorbed in him, and by him, when he was present. Mrs.
Morel sat jealously in her own chair. She was going to hear also. And
even Annie and the father attended, Morel with his head cocked on one
side, like somebody listening to a sermon and feeling conscious of the
fact. Paul ducked his head over the book. He had got now all the
audience he cared for. And Mrs. Morel and Annie almost contested with
Miriam who should listen best and win his favour. He was in very high
feather.
“But,” interrupted Mrs. Morel, “what _is_ the ‘Bride of Enderby’ that
the bells are supposed to ring?”
“It’s an old tune they used to play on the bells for a warning against
water. I suppose the Bride of Enderby was drowned in a flood,” he
replied. He had not the faintest knowledge what it really was, but he
would never have sunk so low as to confess that to his womenfolk. They
listened and believed him. He believed himself.
“And the people knew what that tune meant?” said his mother.
“Yes—just like the Scotch when they heard ‘The Flowers o’ the
Forest’—and when they used to ring the bells backward for alarm.”
“How?” said Annie. “A bell sounds the same whether it’s rung backwards
or forwards.”
“But,” he said, “if you start with the deep bell and ring up to the
high one—der—der—der—der—der—der—der—der!”
He ran up the scale. Everybody thought it clever. He thought so too.
Then, waiting a minute, he continued the poem.
“Hm!” said Mrs. Morel curiously, when he finished. “But I wish
everything that’s written weren’t so sad.”
“_I_ canna see what they want drownin’ theirselves for,” said Morel.
There was a pause. Annie got up to clear the table.
Miriam rose to help with the pots.
“Let _me_ help to wash up,” she said.
“Certainly not,” cried Annie. “You sit down again. There aren’t many.”
And Miriam, who could not be familiar and insist, sat down again to
look at the book with Paul.
He was master of the party; his father was no good. And great tortures
he suffered lest the tin box should be put out at Firsby instead of at
Mablethorpe. And he wasn’t equal to getting a carriage. His bold little
mother did that.
“Here!” she cried to a man. “Here!”
Paul and Annie got behind the rest, convulsed with shamed laughter.
“How much will it be to drive to Brook Cottage?” said Mrs. Morel.
“Two shillings.”
“Why, how far is it?”
“A good way.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
But she scrambled in. There were eight crowded in one old seaside
carriage.
“You see,” said Mrs. Morel, “it’s only threepence each, and if it were
a tram-car—”
They drove along. Each cottage they came to, Mrs. Morel cried:
“Is it this? Now, this is it!”
Everybody sat breathless. They drove past. There was a universal sigh.
“I’m thankful it wasn’t that brute,” said Mrs. Morel. “I _was_
frightened.” They drove on and on.
At last they descended at a house that stood alone over the dyke by the
highroad. There was wild excitement because they had to cross a little
bridge to get into the front garden. But they loved the house that lay
so solitary, with a sea-meadow on one side, and immense expanse of land
patched in white barley, yellow oats, red wheat, and green root-crops,
flat and stretching level to the sky.
Paul kept accounts. He and his mother ran the show. The total
expenses—lodging, food, everything—was sixteen shillings a week per
person. He and Leonard went bathing in the mornings. Morel was
wandering abroad quite early.
“You, Paul,” his mother called from the bedroom, “eat a piece of
bread-and-butter.”
“All right,” he answered.
And when he got back he saw his mother presiding in state at the
breakfast-table. The woman of the house was young. Her husband was
blind, and she did laundry work. So Mrs. Morel always washed the pots
in the kitchen and made the beds.
“But you said you’d have a real holiday,” said Paul, “and now you
work.”
“Work!” she exclaimed. “What are you talking about!”
He loved to go with her across the fields to the village and the sea.
She was afraid of the plank bridge, and he abused her for being a baby.
On the whole he stuck to her as if he were _her_ man.
Miriam did not get much of him, except, perhaps, when all the others
went to the “Coons”. Coons were insufferably stupid to Miriam, so he
thought they were to himself also, and he preached priggishly to Annie
about the fatuity of listening to them. Yet he, too, knew all their
songs, and sang them along the roads roisterously. And if he found
himself listening, the stupidity pleased him very much. Yet to Annie he
said:
“Such rot! there isn’t a grain of intelligence in it. Nobody with more
gumption than a grasshopper could go and sit and listen.” And to Miriam
he said, with much scorn of Annie and the others: “I suppose they’re at
the ‘Coons’.”
It was queer to see Miriam singing coon songs. She had a straight chin
that went in a perpendicular line from the lower lip to the turn. She
always reminded Paul of some sad Botticelli angel when she sang, even
when it was:
“Come down lover’s lane
For a walk with me, talk with me.”
Only when he sketched, or at evening when the others were at the
“Coons”, she had him to herself. He talked to her endlessly about his
love of horizontals: how they, the great levels of sky and land in
Lincolnshire, meant to him the eternality of the will, just as the
bowed Norman arches of the church, repeating themselves, meant the
dogged leaping forward of the persistent human soul, on and on, nobody
knows where; in contradiction to the perpendicular lines and to the
Gothic arch, which, he said, leapt up at heaven and touched the ecstasy
and lost itself in the divine. Himself, he said, was Norman, Miriam was
Gothic. She bowed in consent even to that.
One evening he and she went up the great sweeping shore of sand towards
Theddlethorpe. The long breakers plunged and ran in a hiss of foam
along the coast. It was a warm evening. There was not a figure but
themselves on the far reaches of sand, no noise but the sound of the
sea. Paul loved to see it clanging at the land. He loved to feel
himself between the noise of it and the silence of the sandy shore.
Miriam was with him. Everything grew very intense. It was quite dark
when they turned again. The way home was through a gap in the
sandhills, and then along a raised grass road between two dykes. The
country was black and still. From behind the sandhills came the whisper
of the sea. Paul and Miriam walked in silence. Suddenly he started. The
whole of his blood seemed to burst into flame, and he could scarcely
breathe. An enormous orange moon was staring at them from the rim of
the sandhills. He stood still, looking at it.
“Ah!” cried Miriam, when she saw it.
He remained perfectly still, staring at the immense and ruddy moon, the
only thing in the far-reaching darkness of the level. His heart beat
heavily, the muscles of his arms contracted.
“What is it?” murmured Miriam, waiting for him.
He turned and looked at her. She stood beside him, for ever in shadow.
Her face, covered with the darkness of her hat, was watching him
unseen. But she was brooding. She was slightly afraid—deeply moved and
religious. That was her best state. He was impotent against it. His
blood was concentrated like a flame in his chest. But he could not get
across to her. There were flashes in his blood. But somehow she ignored
them. She was expecting some religious state in him. Still yearning,
she was half aware of his passion, and gazed at him, troubled.
“What is it?” she murmured again.
“It’s the moon,” he answered, frowning.
“Yes,” she assented. “Isn’t it wonderful?” She was curious about him.
The crisis was past.
He did not know himself what was the matter. He was naturally so young,
and their intimacy was so abstract, he did not know he wanted to crush
her on to his breast to ease the ache there. He was afraid of her. The
fact that he might want her as a man wants a woman had in him been
suppressed into a shame. When she shrank in her convulsed, coiled
torture from the thought of such a thing, he had winced to the depths
of his soul. And now this “purity” prevented even their first
love-kiss. It was as if she could scarcely stand the shock of physical
love, even a passionate kiss, and then he was too shrinking and
sensitive to give it.